Neverness. David Zindell
If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.
Lyall Watson, Holocaust Century Eschatologist
Somewhere it is recorded that the first man, Gilgamesh, heard a voice inside him and thought it was the voice of God. I heard voices reverberating through my inner ear, and I thought my fear of the infinite tree had driven me insane.
Why?
It is a sign of insanity when a man hears voices born not of lips but of his own loneliness and longings. Unless, of course, it is the voice of his ship stimulating his aural nerves, suffusing sounds directly into his brain.
Why is man?
But a ship-computer has little free will; it cannot choose what words or what tone of voice to speak within a pilot. It is possible for it to receive signals from another ship-computer and to translate these signals into voices, but it is not programmed to generate its own signals.
Why is man born?
I knew my ship-computer could not be receiving signals from another lightship because the propagation of signals through the manifold was impossible. It was possible, I told myself, that some of my ship’s neurologics had weakened and died. In that case, my ship was insane, and as long as I remained interfaced with it, so was I.
Why is man born to self-deception and lies?
If I did not like the way my ship was echoing my deepest thoughts, it terrorized me when it began speaking voices, in a hodgepodge of the dead languages of Old Earth. Some of these languages I understood from my learning to read; others were as alien to me as the scent language of the Friends of Man is to human beings.
Shalom, Instrumentum Vocale, la ilaha il ALLAH tat tvam asi, n’est-ce pas, kodomo-ga, wakiramasu? Hai, and thereto hadde he riden, no man ferre, poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina which he called the stars of the Solid State Entity und so wir betreten, feuer-trunken – Ahnest du den Schöpfer? It is I. Mallory Ringess.
So, I thought, this is insanity, to greet myself as a tool with a voice, to speak of entering the Entity ‘drunk with fire,’ whatever that meant. I recognized the phrase, Ahnest du den Schöpfer. It was a line of a poem written in Old High German which meant something like, ‘Do you sense your creator?’ I ‘sensed’ that my ship and myself had gone completely mad, either that or it really was receiving a signal through the warped manifold of the Entity. And then I heard:
If thou beest born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee.
So, the Entity did like ancient poetry. If any signal were being sent through the manifold, I thought, it must be coming from Her. The voices began to modulate and resonate into a single voice. In a way, it was a feminine voice, at once seductive and lonely, beatific and sad. It was a voice uncertain as to whether or not it would be understood. Hearing this lovely voice echo the dead languages of Old Earth made me guess that She was probing to discover my milk tongue. But I was mistrustful of this thought the moment it entered my mind. Perhaps I desired too ardently to speak with Her; perhaps I was only speaking with myself.
No, Mallory, you are speaking with me.
– But I’m not speaking at all; I’m thinking.
Do not flatter yourself that what occurs in your mind is true thought.
– How can you read my thoughts … my mind, then?
You are inside of me and I am inside of you. Yin-yang, lingam-yoni, outside-inside. I am an entity, but I am not solid. Not always.
– What are you?
I am the frenzy; I am the lightning; I am your refining fire.
– I don’t understand.
You are a man. Verily, a polluted stream is man. What have you done to purify yourself?
So, I thought, I had longed to experience a greater being, and she spoke to me in riddles. Quickly I turned my mind away from the manifold and the infinite tree. I tested the ship’s neurologics. But they were healthy and sound, and nowhere could I find the source of the Entity’s signal.
There is no signal, as you think of signal. There is only perception and touch: I look into the electric field of your ship’s logics and reach out and jiggle the electrons to change the hologram. And so your computer runs my thoughts and suffuses my voice into your brain. I would touch your brain directly but that would frighten you.
Yes, yes, it would have. I was already frightened enough. I did not want anything alien to ‘jiggle’ the electrons in my brain, to fill me with its images and sounds, to make me see and hear and touch and smell things which did not exist, to change my very perception of reality. With this thought came a much more disturbing thought: What if the Entity already were jiggling my brain’s electrons? Perhaps She only wanted me to think that the voice I heard came from the computer. I did not know what to think. Was I really thinking my own thoughts? Or was the Entity playing with me, making me doubt that I was thinking my own thoughts? Or worse still, what if it all was a nightmare of madness? Maybe the ship had disintegrated; maybe I was experiencing a final moment before death, and the Entity – for whatever reasons – had reached into my brain to create an illusion of sane existence. Maybe I was dead or just dreaming; maybe I, whatever ‘I’ was – was entirely the Entity’s dream creation. Everyone, of course, has these thoughts and fears, but very few have had a goddess speak to them. When I thought of Her being inside my mind, I was dizzy with a sense of losing my self. My stomach churned with a sick feeling that I had no free will. It was an awful moment. I thought that the universe was a terribly uncertain place where I could be certain of only a single thing: that in the realm of my mind, I wanted no thoughts other than my own to alter my thinking.
Because I was full of fear and doubt, the Entity explained how she manipulated matter through the layers of the manifold. But I understood only the smallest part of the physics, the simplest of ideas. She had created a new mathematics to describe the warp and woof of spacetime. Her theory of interconnectedness was as beyond me as a demonstration of the different orders of infinities would be to a worm. Ages ago, of course, the mechanics had explored the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. For example, they had shown that both photons in a pair of photons are connected in fundamental ways no matter how far the two particles are separated in realspace. If two photons fly away from a light source towards the opposite ends of the universe, each will ‘know’ certain of its twin’s attributes, such as spin or polarization, no matter how far apart they are. And they will know it instantaneously, as if each instantly ‘remembered’ it should be polarized horizontally, not up and down. From this discovery the mechanics theorized that it is possible to transmit information faster than light, though to their disgrace they have never succeeded in doing so. But their brains are small where the Entity’s is measureless. It seemed She had found a way not only to communicate but to instantaneously touch and manipulate particles across and through the reaches of space. How She did so, I still do not understand.
– I don’t understand your definition of a correspondence space; is it isomorphic to what we call a Lavi space? I can’t see … if only there was more time!
At the beginning of time all the particles of the universe were crushed together into a single point; all the particles were as one, in the singularity.
– And I don’t remember the derivation of your field equation. It must be –
Memory is everything. All particles remember the instant the singularity exploded